


but i've been so long alone

by SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse



Series: what happens after we don't die [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: I don’t even know what’s up with me I just like it when bad things happen to good people, M/M, Major character is already dead, Post-Canon, Trans Martin Blackwood, also featuring martin's strap-on, alternate summary: martin blackwood cries during sex, in my notes as:, martin tries to have casual sex accidentally has an emotional connection, post-s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:15:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29912649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse/pseuds/SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse
Summary: It’s been six months now since Jon died, and Martin knows that if he doesn’t start warming it his heart is going to freeze over again. So, sex. It’s a good idea, he reminds himself. Intimate but not necessarily emotional, a practice for closeness. Something he never did with Jon, so there won’t be any memories there. Just sort of...an exercise in vulnerability. Keeping all the equipment in order, making sure nothing rots away. So that someday, when he can even imagine being in love again, he’ll be able to.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Original male character
Series: what happens after we don't die [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2199606
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	but i've been so long alone

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot remember at all how I got the idea for this. Please enjoy! Title is from I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms by The Modern Lovers. Content warnings are a little difficult for this one, so I'm going to try to be pretty thorough for some of them.
> 
> Content warnings: sex, alcohol, death and grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms, suicidal ideation, trans character fearing but not experiencing transphobic violence, character who typically enjoys sex having sex for reasons that are not enjoyment, character thinking rude things about the person they are planning to have sex with

Martin is going to have sex tonight. He’s got it written down and everything, in block letters on the big wall calendar he bought himself in an effort to dig his fingernails into time now that it’s linear again. He’s got a spot in mind, a decently busy gay bar not too far from his new flat. He’s got an outfit laid out on a chair, and he’s got a messenger bag for his strap-on and all other necessaries, and he’s got money for drinks and for a ride home and he is beginning to realize, as he familiarizes himself with the intricacies of his new ceiling, that the hardest part of all of this is going to be getting out of bed. 

It would probably be easier to motivate himself if he actually wanted to have sex tonight. Or wanted it physically, rather. Because he does want to have sex. He needs to have sex. Emotionally. Logically. However the two fit together. It’s been six months now since Jon died and Martin knows that if he doesn’t start warming it his heart is going to freeze over again. And that this time there won’t be anyone to thaw it out. He’s not stupid enough to think he’s going to be rescued twice. So, sex. It’s a good idea, he reminds himself. Intimate but not necessarily emotional, a practice for closeness. Something he never did with Jon, so there won’t be any memories there. Just sort of...an exercise in vulnerability. Keeping all the equipment in order, making sure nothing rots away. So that someday, when he can even imagine being in love again, he’ll be able to. 

Jon had wanted that for him. He had told Martin so, in between everything else that spewed out of his mouth as he convulsed on the ground, retching, dying, saving the world. Every horror in existence funneling out of him in a wave of blood and bile and spit and he’d still managed to tell Martin that he loved him. That he wanted him to be happy. To live. 

It’s not so hard, in comparison, for Martin to get up, and put on his outfit, and walk to the bar. Even so, it’s dark by the time he leaves his flat, and he feels distant and woozy from the pre-bar drink he forced down. When he’d first started going to the bars, barely even twenty years old, he’d felt somehow like the hero of his own action movie. (Getting-action movie?) Like a superhero. Shy, lonely Martin Blackwood, walking down the street lit up with entirely fake confidence and more than a little booze, smirking at strangers, dancing to music pouring from car windows, tossing out witty comments to hide how nervous he actually was. Looking like an idiot, probably. High on the adrenaline rush of breaking rules that really only existed in his own mind. He wonders what he’d say, if he passed his younger self walking down the street. Maybe nothing. 

The bar is as Martin expected, dark and loud and crowded on a Friday night. He has to force his way up to the counter and he realizes, as he squeezes past other patrons, that this is the first time in months that he’s touched anyone else. This shouldn’t surprise him— he’s been mostly alone for the past few months, and prior to that there had been the year or so working with Peter, when he’d become so disconnected from the physical presence of other human beings that he’d gasped the first time he’d held Jon’s hand, shocked to remember it was warm. Martin is used to not touching people. He should feel grateful, now, to have this sort of appetizer, even if it’s mostly just elbows jabbing his ribs. He would have been when he was young. But that was before those couple weeks in the cabin with Jon, when touch had become more than just a casual accident, a craving satisfied by brushing fingers with the stranger who handed you your coffee or jostled you on the tube. Instead it had been the two of them on the couch together, in the kitchen, in bed, so close they were practically sinking into each other’s skin. Oh god, he’s getting maudlin and he’s not even drunk yet. Which definitely means he should do shots.

Martin pretty much always buys himself his first round of drinks. Even when he was younger it had taken more than a little liquid courage to loosen him up, once the moment of truth had arrived, and nobody was ever very interested in the awkward guy huddled in on himself in the corner. Tonight, though, he’s still waiting for his order when someone walks up to him. Maybe it’s that he isn’t nervous. Just numb.

“Buy you a drink?” the stranger asks.

“Just got one, actually,” says Martin.

“Oh.” The stranger flounders. Martin gets a feeling that was their only opening move. He knows the type, and takes pity.

“Stick around,” he says, “and you can buy me another.”

“Oh!” the stranger laughs, surprised, and Martin is able to acknowledge, in a distant way, that they’re pretty attractive. Potentially charming, if given the opportunity. Not in the same way as Jon, but of course that’s not what Martin’s here for at all. “Alright then.”

Martin introduces himself, name and pronouns, and the stranger gives his own after only a couple seconds of confused hesitation. That makes Martin feel a little better. They talk until Martin’s shots come, whereupon he downs them at what might be a worrying pace. The stranger turns and orders Martin more of the same thing, only realizing after that he hadn’t actually asked Martin if that’s what he wanted. He blushes. It’s cute.

“You’re cute,” Martin says. He’s making a decision. He’s drunk.

_“You’re_ cute,” the stranger says. “Do you come here often? Oh, no, that was _terrible,_ let me try again—”

Martin laughs. It’s genuine, which surprises him. “Good flirting is for movies,” he says. “Your place or mine?”

The stranger blinks. Smiles, like he can’t believe his own luck. “Mine’s close.”

“Fantastic,” says Martin. “Buy me one more drink, and I’ll forgive you for making me do the walk of shame hungover.”

“Not a walk of shame when it’s from my flat,” says the stranger. He must feel brilliant right now. Hooking up with someone who just can’t _wait_ to get started on him, whipping what he clearly thinks is razor _-_ sharp wit back and forth like he’s a character in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Maybe he’ll come just from that.

Martin snaps himself out of it. He’s already using the guy as a post-mortem rebound. No need to be nasty about it too. 

The cold air helps, when they get out of the bar. Martin is a bit drunker than he’d like to be for sex, but he’s always been good at acting reasonably sober. He lets himself lean on the stranger anyway. Feels his muscles under his shirt and tries to look forward to the way they’ll feel when they’re not under his shirt. Tries to decide how to actually mention the whole ‘I don’t have a dick’ thing. Usually he likes to determine a potential hookup’s opinions on the general existence of trans people before he even thinks about bringing them home, but tonight— They actually haven’t discussed anything, have they? No details at all beyond where they’re going. Too easy, almost. Like walking into a trap. Statement of Martin Blackwood, regarding sex with a Stranger— 

No. He shakes his head, ignores the stranger’s laugh as he jostles his shoulder. So someone thinks he’s cute and wants to sleep with him. He’s never had a dry spell long enough to make _that_ seem supernatural. And the stranger had gone along with the pronouns, so at the very least he’ll pretend not to be a piece of shit for however long it takes him to get in and out of Martin’s pants. Next time he’ll look for somebody with a flag button or something.

They reach the stranger’s flat after another couple of blocks, and Martin hangs back while he unlocks the door. For a minute, Martin considers suggesting they rest. But that’s not right. They haven’t been slogging through horrors for some indefinable amount of time. There’s nothing on the other side of the door but a decently-kept bachelor pad.

It had been nice, resting. It shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t ever refreshing, really. Hardly even a relief. Only a break in the horror that was still there, stil pressing in on all sides. Jon had compared it to coffee once, which seemed to explain why he hated the stuff. “Giving us just enough energy to keep suffering,” he’d said in that grim voice, the funny one, the one that meant he was keeping a straight face because he wanted Martin to laugh for him. Martin had catalogued everything about him like that. What every smile meant, every sigh. The only thing the end of the world couldn’t take away from him.

“You coming?” the stranger says over his shoulder. “You can put your bag down anywhere. My roommates aren’t home. Shouldn’t be.” He calls some names into the flat, and leads Martin inside when no one answers. Most of the lights are off, which saves Martin from having to think of anything nice to say about the place.

The stranger’s bedroom is neat, with all sorts of plants stacked up near the window. Martin should get some plants. Have something alive in his flat. He sits down on the bed and starts digging through his bag. The stranger looks surprised when he pulls out his strap-on, and Martin’s never been sure what reaction he wants, exactly, from cis guys, but he gives him a teasing little smile anyway. The stranger grins back, then stops pulling off his shirt to come kneel in front of Martin. “Mind if I do?”

“Sure.”

The stranger examines Martin’s strap-on, then closes his lips around it and takes it into his mouth with a move that says promising things about his gag reflex. Martin gives the strap-on an encouraging sort of wiggle. It’s closer to his knee than his crotch at the moment, but he appreciates the enthusiasm. And that they’re getting right to the sex. Not stopping for small talk, for personal questions. Not stopping for anything he would’ve done with Jon, basically. 

He grabs the stranger’s shirt with his free hand and rucks it up to his armpits, hoping this comes across as take-charge and sexy rather than impatient. The stranger snorts around his mouthful of plastic dick and wriggles the rest of the way out. He’s got a nice, soft torso, with a bit of padding on his hips and several tattoos that anyone with good taste would regret. Martin pulls his strap-on out of the stranger’s mouth with a pop and works on stripping down to his binder and boxers. By the time he’s done the stranger is naked and half-hard. This shouldn’t take long. 

“Do you want to ride me?” Martin asks, finally pulling on the harness for his strap-on. Sticking his courage to the screwing place, Jon had called it during one candid late-night discussion. Martin had spat wine down his shirt. “Or do you want me to fuck you into the mattress?” 

“The second one, but don’t you want to mess around a little first?” The stranger climbs onto the bed, and Martin scoots over to make room for him. It’s a small bed. “You have nice arms.”

“Thanks,” says Martin. “Um, you too.” He grabs the stranger by the hips and, after some fumbling, gets them arranged so that Martin’s lying on top of him, face to face. The perma-boner nature of the strap-on prevents them from actually grinding, and the stranger ends up just rubbing off on Martin’s bare stomach. This, at least, Martin likes. It makes him feel like a dog toy or something. He tries to focus on the sensations of it all, sweat and heat and the chafing tug where his harness rides up over his underwear. The give of skin under his teeth when he bites down just above the stranger’s collarbone. A connection. He’s connecting. 

He lifts himself off the stranger, sits back on his heels. “I’ve got lube in my bag. Unless you want to use your own?”

“Hang on.” The stranger pulls himself up onto his elbows. “Can we slow down for a minute? Not that I’m not looking forward to having your dick in me, but…”

“Oh.” Martin reminds himself, firmly, that the stranger is a real person who has no idea that he’s being used as some last-ditch attempt to cling to humanity. “Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the stranger says. And then makes Martin wonder if _he’s_ not getting used as a rebound himself by grabbing the sides of Martin’s face and pulling him into a kiss like he’s competing to be on the cover of a harlequin romance novel. Would explain the checking for roommates, if he didn’t want word getting back to his ex. But sure, slow. Slow is good. Slow is—

Slow is something he could have had with Jon. And warmth, and softness, and pressing so close he can’t tell where one person ends and the other begins. Like they have all the time in the world. Martin is shaking with sobs before he even realizes he’s crying. 

“Oh, god,” says the stranger. He lets go of Martin’s face, then puts a hand in his hair and starts stroking it very carefully, maybe trying to determine what exactly his responsibilities are as a casual hookup. “Are you alright? No, dumb question—” 

“My boyfriend,” Martin sobs. 

The stranger stills but doesn’t pull away. “You have a boyfriend?”

Martin squirms away from the stranger and buries his face in his chest so he doesn’t have to look him in the eyes. _“No.”_

“You...want a boyfriend?”

“No,” says Martin, muffled, smearing tears and snot across a stranger’s skin. “No. Yes. No. I mean, I had one. He— he’s dead.” 

“Oh shit,” says the stranger. “I’m, uh, I’m sorry for your loss. _Smooth,”_ he adds under his breath. 

Martin just keeps crying. He knows he should leave, apologize for whatever the fuck this is and let the stranger have an anticlimatic wank by himself, but he feels like if he walks out of here alone he’s going to disappear somehow. Just going to get swallowed up by the nothingness he’s been trying to outrun all evening. Or what remains of the Lonely, if that’s still a concern. Doesn’t matter. All he can do is cling.

“Alright,” the stranger says. His hand is still in Martin’s hair. “Alright, do, do you want to talk about it? About him?”

“I don’t know,” says Martin. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got kind of a thing for crying, actually.” The stranger wriggles demonstratively against Martin’s thigh. “I mean, that’s not why I’m asking! But if you think it would help you to talk about him, um, I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”

In Martin’s experience, people usually only tell you you’re a good listener when they really want to talk about themselves. But he pushes the cynicism away. He’d wanted to get close to someone, hadn’t he? Wanted to practice at intimacy. And here’s someone who wants to help him with that, and who’s drunk, and who Martin will definitely never, ever, ever see again. “Thank you,” he says. Sniffles. “That would be really nice.”

“Cool.” The stranger shifts a bit, and grabs a blanket to pull over both of them. “So. Tell me about him?”

Martin sighs. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Okay. How about the classic. Where did you meet?”

“Oh, Jesus.” Martin rolls to the side so that he’s not muffling any of his disgust. “At our job. At our horrible, horrible job.”

“Can’t be that horrible if you met there.”

“No, it definitely can. But...yeah. I guess we got something out of it. I definitely wouldn’t have met him otherwise. Do you ever think about that? All the things it took for you to meet somebody and everything— everything you might allow if you needed to make it happen again.”

The stranger is quiet for a couple seconds. “Sometimes.” 

“People died.”

“Okay, maybe I wouldn’t allow people to _die,_ but— Where the fuck did you two _work?”_

“The Magnus Institute. Have you heard of it? It’s like— Imagine a prison, but only for librarians.”

“That sounds like hell.”

“Yeah. No. It was...I don’t know. I don’t know if we would’ve gotten as close as we did, at a normal job. We were practically living together at one point.” Martin smiles up at the ceiling, like he could see the two of them projected there, both of them slumped over mugs of tea at the table in the breakroom as the clock ticked towards midnight. Jon had never wanted to go home, after Martin’s encounter with Prentiss, and Martin had never wanted to go to sleep. “But then _he_ wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t taken the job. Is it… Is it wrong, that I’m still sort of glad he did?”

“I don’t think it really matters,” says the stranger. “You can’t change anything now, can you?”

“Guess not. Felt like I could barely change anything when it was happening.”

“But you fell in love with him.”

“But I fell in love with him. Maybe that was my mistake, now that I think about it.” Martin glances over at the stranger, who’s now wearing what Martin’s taken to calling a therapist expression. Maybe he is one, when he’s not picking people up in bars. “Because with everything else, there were so many variables, you know? All these fucking threads getting subtly tugged one way or the other. But with _that—_

“And I’m angry at him, too.” Martin takes a breath. He hadn’t expected to say that. But it’s true. “I’m really, really fucking angry at him. I don’t even mean— Not that there was a way for him not to die, if, if he’d been smarter, or more careful. Just that he did at all. And left me. And told me that I can’t follow him.”

“Woah, hang on.” The stranger sits up a little. Martin can actually feel him go soft, which is— Heartwarming? He thinks? “You’re not going to—”

“Don’t worry.” Martin laughs. “Not in your room.”

“I’m serious.”

“No, no, I’m sorry. Don’t worry about me, okay? I’m not going to kill myself. I owe him that much.”

“Well don’t stay alive because you _owe_ him. Stay alive because it’s nice to be alive.”

“Don’t think I’m quite there yet, to be honest.” 

“Fair enough.” The stranger lays back down next to Martin. His hand is still in Martin’s hair, and Martin wonders, again, what exactly it is that he’s trying to get out of this. He doesn’t really want to ask, though. He still stands by what he thinks about good listeners. “So besides all the death stuff,” the stranger says, “why did you start dating? What did you like about him?”

“God, that’s so hard to say. Not, not that I can’t think of anything I liked about him, but—” Martin thinks for a minute. “But you know that thing about the scientists that put frogs in cold water and kept turning up the heat until they were boiling, but the frogs never jumped out because the change was so gradual that they didn’t notice and they boiled alive?”

“Huh,” says the stranger.

“He told me about that, actually. Apparently the frogs were tranquilized or something so it was like, impossible for them to jump out whether they could tell the water was boiling or not. It was kind of a pet peeve of his, people not knowing stuff like that.” Martin laughs to himself. That had been another late night, or maybe an early morning. Halfway through the explanation he’d stopped paying attention so much to Jon’s words and started focusing on the way his hands moved when he gestured, the way his eyes lit up. It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared about what Jon had to say. It was just that he was so captivating when he said it. “But yeah, it was kind of like that. We were so busy all the time, and also kind of in constant life-threatening danger, and I never really had time to notice that I was falling in love. And then one day I realized that I was. And that I had been for a long time.”

“That sounds nice,” says the stranger. His voice is soft. “Do you know when he realized he was in love with you?”

“We talked about it, once. Apparently it was— It was right before he asked me to run away with him, kind of.”

“Run _away_ with him? From the — what was it — jail for librarians?”

“Yeah. He, he’d found a way for us to maybe quit our jobs and he said, he said he was going to tell me anyway, of course, but when he was going to find me he realized that he didn’t want to— to do what he was going to have to do if I wasn’t going to. He didn’t want to leave without me.”

“Wow,” says the stranger. “That’s, that’s really romantic, honestly. Maybe _I_ should get a job at a librarian jail.”

Martin laughs. “You might already have one. I didn’t realize for like five years.”

“Uh—”

“Anyway, that’s when he fell in love with me. But _apparently—”_ Martin smiles at the memory. That had been a conversation they’d had at the safehouse, while out on a walk, with Jon pausing to point out features of the landscape whenever his own admittances got to be too much for him. “Apparently, he started having a crush on me a couple years before that when I threw a bunch of worms on his desk.” 

“That’s— Wow.” The therapist expression is gone entirely. “You guys must have been really...compatible.”

Martin sighs. He snuggles a bit closer to the stranger. Not because he’s a substitute for Jon, but because he’s kind, and funny, and warm. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “But we made it work.”

They talk for a while longer. Martin shares a couple more memories about Jon, and then, because he _was_ trying to make an actual connection with another human being tonight, asks the stranger about his own life. It’s a nice, normal life, with nice, normal problems. The stranger has, in fact, just gotten out of a relationship — five years, which Martin can’t imagine and also doesn’t want to imagine right now — and he’s trying to figure out who he is without the person he thought he’d be with for the rest of his life. He’s had to move back in with some friends, and he’s so unbearably lonely sometimes that he feels like a hole is going to open up underneath him, and he’s waffling on laser tattoo removal because his ex did all his designs and they’re _really cool_ but he doesn’t want to be reminded of her every time he takes his shirt off. Martin does not weigh in on this last dilemma. Eventually the alcohol wears off, but even after they’re undeniably two completely sober strangers bitching about their exes while mostly naked, Martin doesn’t feel like he’s done anything stupid. It’s nice, honestly, to just talk to somebody without the constant undercurrent of worry that they’re both going to die.

By the time Martin takes his leave, the sun is starting to come up. “I just need to tell you,” he says, stepping out of the harness to his strap-on, “and it’s not your fault or anything, but I am absolutely never going to talk to you again.”

The stranger takes this in. “We could fuck without talking.”

“I _cried_ on you—”

“Yeah, yeah.” The stranger laughs. “I get it. And honestly, I’m not looking for much more than one night stands for— a while. But it’s been nice meeting you.”

“Thanks,” says Martin. “It’s been nice meeting you too.”

They hug, at the door, after they both awkwardly go for it and then stop and then laugh at themselves and then go for it again. It’s nothing like hugging Jon. He’ll get used to it.

Martin heads back to his flat feeling calm. Anchored. He still doesn’t know what he’d say to his younger self if he passed him in the street now. Probably nothing. But that’s okay. He’ll figure out on his own that everything is going to work out alright.


End file.
